The meal draws to a close, or perhaps not even that yet. It happens that one child leaps suddenly from his chair, and then another, and then another, leaving behind them the wreckage of dinner: a tableful of partially eaten items and uncleared dishes, spills and drips, the telltale ring of debris around the chairs. In sweet oblivion they spring about the sofas, grabbing all manner of things with pizza-stained fingers...

Such is the image that comes to mind when I consider the state of my Kindle. Consider some of the books I have poked and nibbled at in the last 5 months without finishing:

Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. Jeff Guinn. After a dazzling account of his youth and prison years, the formation of his Family and their murders I have bogged down in the minutia of the murder investigations.

En Route. J.K. Huysmans. A novel about seeking genuine faith amidst the cosmopolitanism of Paris at the turn of the century. I'd just gotten to the good part - Durtal's discovery of Trappist life - but then I put it down.

Arguably, Essays by Christopher Hitchens. I am mesmerized by his scope and style, as I am by his YouTube appearances. Bluster and brilliance in equal measure.

The Basic Works of Aristotle. I have a feeling I'll be "in the midst" of these works for the rest of my life.

Complete Works. Plato. Ditto.

New American Bible. Made a dash and this time got all the way up to Job, one of the more readable books, before losing steam.

The Clementine Vulgate. My Latin is getting there.

The Complete Works of Saint Augustine. Isidore of Seville famously said of Augustine's works: He is a liar who confesses to have read the whole.

Consider the Lobster and other Essays. By David Foster Wallace. Journalistic pyrotechnics.

Delphi Complete Works of Lord Byron. Stuck in the middle of Childe Harold. Need to get on that. Byron's ability to turn a phrase is peerless. Plus he swam the Hellespont. What's not to love?

Die Welt von Gestern. Stefan Zweig. Another great work I've managed never to finish.

The Federalist Papers. Sigh.

Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and his Times. Robert Dallek. Just started this one, looks really interesting. I really enjoyed his work on Nixon and Kissinger, and I would like to backfill my understanding of the decades preceding my political awareness. My own impression is that somewhere around 1965 a whole lot of influential people simply let go of the controls. Is this impression founded? And if so, how to explain it?

General Metaphysics. John Rickaby SJ. From the "manualist" days of the rebirth of Thomism.

Hallucinations. Oliver Sacks. How can something so fascinating be so boring? That is, with Sacks I feel I have finally arrived at the end of a thread of questions and am about to finally receive the answers. And then I just stop. In this book he asks the very question I have found missing in all other discussion of hallucinations: even if we do manage to reduce hallucination to physical aberration, how do we account for the specific content of this particular patient's hallucinations? Do they perhaps have a meaning? At issue are our conceptions of health and normal functions, as well as possible independence of mind and brain.

How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). Ann Coulter. Dig through the grand narratives, straw man attacks and spotty humor and you find some interesting facts.

Introduction to the Devout Life. St. Francis de Sales. Not the sort of book you just dash through...

Lumen Fidei. Pope Francis. Just need to lock myself away with it.

Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law. Joseph Rickaby again. Many are the appeals to natural law - but how hard it is to find an account of what exactly natural law is!

Notes from the Underground. Dostoyevsky.

Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream. Dinesh D'Souza. Wherein he typecasts the president as an anticolonialist, and as such quite different than yesterday's liberal.

Orthodoxy. G.K. Chesterton. Just can't get into his bloated style. But everybody who refers to it does so in a glowing way.

Philosophy Before Socrates. McKirahan. A careful but tendentious approach.

The Pivot of Civilization. Margaret Sanger. Vilified by Pro-Lifers to such an extent that I feel compelled to seek what merits there be. If anything were entirely evil it would cease to exist.

The Pope's Last Crusade: How an American Jesuit Helped Pope Pius XI's Campaign to Stop Hitler. Peter Eisner. One of these days I have to stop postponing an evaluation of the "Hitler's Pope" debate.

Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought. Man do I need to just finish this! And it's really not as monolithic as I expected.

The Satyricon. Petronius. I recently took a Latin course where we translated a number of passages adapted and gathered in a book entitled The Millionaire's Dinner Party. Wonderfully decadent - I want to read the rest now.

Septuagint: Greek and English. Certainly need the crutch there.

Summa Theologica. Aquinas. How long can I put this off?

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. Jacob Heilbrunn. Great stuff.

Uncertainty. David Lindley. An ultimately tedious account of the history of Heisenberg's principle, oscillating between substance and anectdote. I don't see myself returning to finish it.

But even when I do manage to finish one book, I have the awful tendency to jump immediately into the next book without doubling back for a critical recap. The act of reading becomes scarcely distinguishable from channel surfing. How much I stand to gain from just a little effort!

Of my finished books I hope to put especially a few under such scrutiny:

The Last Superstition. Edward Feser. Feser is one of the few Thomist philosophers out there able and willing to weigh in on the contemporary scene.

Foucault: A Very Short Introduction. Gary Gutting. Need to get inside Foucault's head. Most retro-inclined philosophers roll their eyes, to their own detriment.

Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle their Political Journeys. Mary Eberstadt. For one thing, I want to try to pin down exactly what we mean by 'conservative'.

And if I ever finish them, I would hope to write on the Manson book as well as Huysmans in particular. A New Year's resolution?

Note for the record that the above mentioned children usually are quite good about eating and cleaning up afterwards.